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Like characters in an old “Twilight Zone” episode, the sailors of the America’s Cup are stuck in another dimension. They can’t race, but they can’t go home either.

“Welcome to the Hotel California,” one wag wrote on a Media Center window on Pier 27. “You can check in but you can never leave!”

For the eighth time in the finals and the seventh because of uncooperative winds, races in the finals were postponed Saturday. This time it wasn’t because they were too strong or too light. They just came from the wrong direction, the south.

Mother Nature has become a cantankerous woman who clearly has it in for the America’s Cup. Weather postponements are common in sailing, but this regatta is laden with the anxiety of a snowbound airport.

For that matter, many New Zealanders have already had to fly home without seeing their heroes win the oldest trophy in international sports. They had understandably assumed the regatta would be over by now.

“I feel for everyone that’s been caught up in this,” regatta director Iain Murray said. But he said, “The framework of the competition was set over a year ago. There’s a lot at stake. This represents years of preparations and hundreds of millions of dollars.”

After a delay of an hour and 10 minutes, Race 14 was scrapped because of predominantly southerly winds that made the east-west racecourse unplayable. Race 15 was hopeless because the delay pushed it outside the TV window.

The racing will pick up again Sunday – unless, say, the sailors are bombarded with seagull droppings in the pre-start box. At this point, anything is possible – but the forecast is for more favorable conditions: southwesterly winds in the high-teens to go with a flood tide.

The finals will be 16 days old Sunday, equaling the 2003 record for the longest America’s Cup series in the event’s 162-year history. Yet Saturday marked only the second full day lost to weather in 81 days since the regatta opened in July.

That’s no consolation to Emirates Team New Zealand, which remains one win from capturing the Auld Mug. Although the Kiwis lead the series 8-3, they have been stuck on match point for four days. Oracle has actually won five races but started two in the hole because of jury penalties for cheating.

Besides the seven wind-related postponements, another race was put off when Oracle played its one provisional card when it was down 4-to-minus-1.

The Saturday program was in doubt for several hours, not because of the morning rain that drenched America’s Cup Park on Piers 27-29 and America’s Cup Village on the Marina Green but because of the wind direction.

With a southerly wind, the two normally downwind legs and the normally upwind third leg would have been reaching legs, and the short first and fifth legs – instead of reaches – would have been upwind challenges. Such a course would be just as impractical as a NASCAR oval that’s banked toward the outside instead of the inside.

“We saw this day coming a few days ago,” Murray said.

On Friday night he offered the teams an alternate north-south course running from the San Francisco shoreline toward Treasure Island, but neither team would agree.

“The racing that’s left is extremely important, and the teams don’t want to chance something that they’re not prepared for,” Murray said.

If the teams had agreed to the alternate course, the Coast Guard would have interrupted shipping on the bay for the duration of the racing. Even mighty container freighters would have had to give way to the 72-foot catamarans.

The Cup may be over Sunday, but in this competition it’s absurd to take anything for granted.

34th America’s Cup

What: Finals on San Francisco Bay

Next races: Sunday, 1:15 and (if needed) 2:15 p.m.

Score: Emirates Team New Zealand 8, Oracle Team USA 3

Format: New Zealand needs to win nine points, or nine races, total in the best-of-17 series. However, the U.S. was penalized by an international jury and needs to win 11 races, in which case the series could be extended to as many as 19 races.

Boats: 72-foot catamarans with 131-foot wing sails and crews of 11.

TV: Channel: 11 , NBC Sports Network. Replays will be shown on the America’s Cup YouTube channel immediately after the live broadcast.

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Tom FitzGerald is the Stanford sports beat writer for The Chronicle. In more than three decades at The Chronicle, he has covered the 49ers and Raiders and a wide variety of other sports, including auto races. Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. In 2012 he rode on Russell Coutts’ Oracle Team USA catamaran for another first-person story during the America's Cup World Series. In 2014 he rode with IndyCar legend Mario Andretti in a racecar at Sonoma Raceway, hitting speeds of more than 150 mph.
For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called “Top of the Sixth’’ (later named Open Season). He lives in Martinez.